KAMPING KITBASH Part One

I’m experimenting with something as we crest this new, post-100 games horizon. This is going to be a (very) extended version of the blog parts of my design notes, with an eye to (hopefully) saying something interesting about design. I'm releasing this in two parts because, honestly, it's massive. So look forward to part two next week.

I went to Belgium to make toy soldiers last weekend at Kamping Kitbash.

Kamping Kitbash is a strange affair indeed: three days dedicated to making miniatures in ways the designers did not intend for them to be made. Last year, as part of a combined effort between the Belgian organisers and an artist collective in the Netherlands called SICKHOUSE, I was asked to attend to lead some kind of games design workshop in Enschede. 

I attempted to teach people how to make a miniatures game, which proved challenging because a) I haven’t really done much of that and b) I had expected there to be more miniatures for people to make up a game about, as we only had a handful of pieces from the previous Kamping Kitbash earlier that year.

My method of teaching at that time amounted to a brief period of me telling the audience what a game was both in mechanical and fictional terms, breaking it down as finely as I decided would be interesting, and then telling them to get on with it and make one. 

It went... okay! 

We had some fun ideas - including a truly inspired asynchronous month-long game played with garden gnomes, during which you were not allowed to witness the other player moving the gnomes - but it was too much to expect people to go from zero to game designer in three hours. (And! Three hours is a long time to concentrate on something.) 

I worked out what I should have done about a full 24 hours after the workshop finished, sitting quietly stoned in my well-appointed B&B room and eating peanuts by the fistful in my underwear.

WHAT IS KITBASHING?

Let’s talk about kitbashing for a second before we return to that potent image.

I fuckin adore kitbashing. For the uninitiated, kitbashing is when you take parts from multiple miniatures kits and combine them to make something new. Ever since we’ve had kits, we’ve been bashing them; the most popular brand of toy soldiers in history, namely the Warhammer 40,000 line of far-future battle dollies, arose from Games Workshop - who only made fantasy miniatures at the time - releasing a set of hands holding autopistols and chainblades intended to convert their orcs into space orcs and their elves into space elves. The rules pamphlet they released alongside would go on to become Rogue Trader, the first incarnation of 40k, and a very different beast from the standardised oo-rah WW2 in space that it is today.

My first GW game - my first foray into nerd shit, outside of a near-lifelong fascination with video games since I first witnessed Sonic the Hedgehog in 1993 - was Gorkamorka, and Gorkamorka expressly encouraged kitbashing. It was an attempt to recreate the ramshackle vehicle battles of Mad Max on the tabletop, and whether it was any good or not (I fear that it wasn’t, really) it captured my heart in its entirety.

Here was a game where you were allowed to make a truck any shape you liked and physically wedge your models onto the flatbed; a game where your mob’s equipment changed between fights, requiring you to snip them apart after they were finished and update the model; a game where you were not provided with all the models you might need to represent everything in the book.

So, since I’ve been making toy soldiers, I’ve been making them weird, and I have been making them for the best part of twenty-five years. I have a cabinet of minis I’ve put together and painted, and not a single one of them is built according to the instructions in the box; I just don’t like doing it. It feels like a waste of good plastic.

This means that I have trouble making an army, which is rather what you’re expected to do with toy soldiers, so I’ve not engaged in the playing side of the hobby as often as many people. As I’ve grown older I’ve found other people with similar proclivities so I’ve experimented with smaller-scale systems like The Doomed (formerly GRIMLITE), Space Weirdos, and most recently Trench Crusade. 

But: I don’t mind that I don’t play often, because what I like is making the little guys, not necessarily doing anything with them. Each one has a little story attached to it that I don’t write down or even really fully think through; each gang or retinue or unit is a series of choices intended to paint a broad picture of characters and purpose that plays with the existing lore.

Last year I made an Inquisitor (making Inquisitors is probably my favourite) and then started arranging a group around him: I decided he was Ordo Malleus, or a demon hunter, so he’d have a Grey Knight space marine companion that could hunt demons for him.

And then he’d need psychic support, so I made a psychic adept wired into a weird machine.

But also he’s a wizard, like almost all Inquisitors, so I made a guy with a bookshelf instead of hands to carry around his spellbook. 

GOING INTO INCREDIBLE DETAIL

You can skip this bit if you’d like. (I mean. You can skip the whole damned thing. I’m not your boss.) This is what went into making this Inquisitor I mentioned in the previous paragraph:

His legs are from a Delaque ganger - a spooky assassin type from Necromunda - which I filed down a bit to accommodate the torso, a power-armoured body from the Deathwatch space marine kit. I chose the legs because they looked like robes (suitable for a wizard, natch) and the body because it had a whacking great Inquisition symbol on the front.

The arms are from Necron Lychguards - ancient synthetic guardians for robot necromancer warlocks - because I wanted to accentuate how old and knackered he was, so I could have them hanging down by his sides and nearly scraping along the ground. Also having two replacement prosthetic arms seems like the sort of thing a dedicated demon hunter would need if demons ripped off both his arms. The shoulder pads, intended to cover up the fact he has hex bolts for shoulders, are from the Stormtroopers kit. 

If he’s a wizard he needs a staff, so I made one. Originally I had a big hammer in his left hand, but it looked too unbalanced, so I pulled it back. Both ends are from different parts of the Sororitas Novitiate kit, a gang of unarmoured nuns who do their military training by engaging in small unit actions whilst wearing a wimple and leather trousers.

The shotgun is from the Genestealer Cults Hybrid kit, which has a lot of current-day looking weapons on it like assault rifles and break-action shotguns, because it represents an armed uprising of miners infected by an alien hive-mind. (I scraped off the hands moulded to the gun with painstaking scalpel and sandpaper work.) I thought it would provide a fun contrast to the wizard’s staff and paint this guy as a pragmatist who uses whatever works best.

The backpack is from Greytide Studio, and it’s 3D-printed. (Some businesses make their money off making conversion kits or stand-in pieces for Games Workshop models.) I like how heavy it looks, and also like how there’s a small church mounted on him. I wanted more pipes so I cut the bottom half off a Deathwatch power pack and glued it on top. I try to use more than one part from each kit I use, if I can, which helps tie together the visual language a bit; the round vent on his tummy and big I on his back, which you can’t see, are from there too.

The head is two heads stuck together; one from a lunatic Empire Flagellant, and the crest from Johnny-Come-Lately-Space-Marines-in-Fantasy faction Stormcast Eternals. (I carved out the head and left the top bit intact.)  From there it’s just details, which include a shotgun holster (with the shotgun removed) from Judge-Dread-wannabes Arbitrators kit because he needs somewhere to put his shotgun, the handcuffs from the Palanite Enforcers sprue (also cops) so he can capture people for creepy psychic interrogation, and an arcane doohickey from some Empire sprue or another because I wanted to really underline the wizard bit. The skull is from the Skulls kit (duh), because I figured it looked like demon bones, and god knows where the purity seals originated from. GW’s been putting them on every other sprue since they worked out how to do it 1998. 

So: hard-bitten, exhausted, ancient wizard cop who hunts demons. The process of choosing these parts is a long-winded one, and it consists of lots of looking intently at tiny pieces of plastic before test-fitting them with blue-tack to see if they look good. 

NOW: BACK TO ME AND MY UNDERWEAR

It’s that “staring intently” process that I wanted to channel into my workshop. Before attending my first Kamp, I had never really used anyone else’s bits to make a miniature. In Enschede, we had boxes and boxes and boxes of sprues - and huge amounts of loose parts - and all sorts of stuff that wasn’t your standard Games Workshop grey plastic, like resin prints of squirrel warriors and plastic toy dinosaurs and half a Barbie doll and bags of moss. I was in love with it: delving wrist-deep into potential, grabbing whatever I could find, and making up something as I went along. 

It’s not as measured as the way I do it at home - it’s slightly frantic, and messy, and a different kind of thing. Most everyone in the room is doing it, too; just making something for the joy of making it, pouring bicarbonate of soda onto wet superglue to set it messily, slapping rainbow paints onto unrecognisable parts, chatting and experimenting and handing each other spare bits. You’ve only got a weekend to do it. Best do something daft and immediate.

What if I could make a kitbash games design workshop? The idea crested beautifully through my addled mind, shoving aside the flotsam of legal cannabis. I pawed at my laptop as I sat cross-legged on the double bed, loose peanuts scattered on the white sheets around me.

(I always buy a large bag of peanuts on day one of any trip because my partner, Maz, is deathly allergic to peanuts. This is the only way I can get my fix.)

The idea was simple enough: I break a roleplaying game into its constituent parts, as normal, then instead of loosely describing the function of those parts and encouraging the participants to try and make their own, I write as many examples as I can manage. After some experimentation, I got it down to nine different types of thing:

CHARACTERS: The roles the players take on during the game.

Mischievous goblins; Cyberpunk operators; Maverick wizards; Cursed Undead.

GOAL: The overarching objective of the characters.

Get a date for prom; Bury the body of our honoured elder; Escape the cursed city; Kill monsters and take their stuff.

STATS: A means, often numerical, of judging the ability of the characters to affect the game world.

Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Wisdom, Intelligence, Charisma; HOT, WEIRD, SHARP, COLD; Cups, Wands, Swords, Coins.

VIBES: How players should feel whilst playing the game.

Uncomfortable; excited; confused; powerful.

MECHANICS: A way of resolving challenging actions when the outcome is in doubt.

Roll a D20 under your stat; roll 2D6 and get 7 or more; both you and the GM light a match and hold it, and the first to drop it loses.

ACTIONS: Important moves a player character can make which push the game forward. 

Climb higher up the tower; Consecrate the body to stop restless spirits rising; Whisper your misgivings into the Suspicion Cube.

ABILITIES: Individual things a character can do that mark them out as special in some way from the others. (I probably didn’t need this one; it’s overkill, and beyond the scope of a quick session like the one I had planned.)

Overcharge a spell by risking damage to yourself; Kick any door off its hinges first time; Talk to burrowing animals.

RESOURCES: Something non-unique a character can spend, earn, risk, lose or otherwise mess about with to make a mechanical impact on the game.

Hit points; gold pieces; bars of soap.

BITS: Any gag that didn’t fit into the other sections; loose snacky bits of rules.

Goblins steal D100 wealth per round; If you yell the name of an attack before doing it, you do double damage; If it’s your birthday you get to re-roll failures.

What I wanted to do was work out a way to print out all of these individual elements, shove them in boxes like the collections of loose bits we were rummaging through, and let people pick out whichever ones they like. Just like I was finding disparate pieces and bodging them together with glue and putty, I wanted to give people these things and encourage them to mash it all into a single beautiful thing that I never could have imagined.

STRIKING WITH ALL THE SPEED AND FERVOUR OF A DEAD SOFA

Then: I did nothing for a full year.

We floated the idea of running the kitbash games design show at Pyrkon, when we went in August, but we couldn’t come up with a solid enough way of making the physical element of the experience. We couldn’t just print them on paper - they had to be rummageable. 

Folks would need to rifle through the boxes in search of inspiration. Part of the fun of kitbashing is the serendipity of the whole affair: you hold a loose idea in your head and then just look at bits for a while and select ones you think might be interesting to add to the composition. You can’t see all the bits at once, and you can’t be expected to remember a) what each and every component you have looks like, let alone b) where the fuck it is in your collection.

When you’re using a communal source of bits, you can’t know what’s in there. So you’re rummaging with an open mind, half looking for something that fits your current plan, and half ready to change your plan if you find something more interesting during your search. I like that - it reminds me of improv, and of how I write games. Nothing’s too precious to throw away, or saw off, or repurpose if there’s something more exciting at the end of it. (On that subject! After accidentally announcing SALT on this Patreon a few months back, I am giving it a complete overhaul. I’m not even sure if there’s boats in it anymore. Expect something decent by the end of the year. Or next year. God knows.)

The best idea we had was to print them out on cardboard and use plastic sleeves, but it wasn’t... feely enough. So with limited time and even less enthusiasm for actually making workshop materials, we kicked the idea off to one side and instead did a more focused Havoc Engine game jam, which certainly worked and involved no printing whatsoever.

But: Chosen By Goblins, the Belgian organisation that arranged the first Kamping Kitbash, cornered me at Salute (a wargames convention in London) and asked if I’d run something again at the 2025 event. Now: they couldn’t pay me, because they didn’t have the funding that the EU provided previously. Nor could they cover my travel. Or any accommodation past a shared room in a hostel. But: would I like to take part?

You’re damned right I’d like to. The first KK was a revelatory experience for me. And, I wagered, these scrappy 20-something Belgians would be up for making a kit to enable the Kitbash Games Jam to take place.

TAKING ADVANTAGE OF SCRAPPY TWENTY-SOMETHING BELGIANS

I got on a call with Tine and Daan, two Goblins who I’d hit it off with at the previous event. They very kindly offered to make up a set of proper pieces to run the jam by laser-cutting wood into tokens, painting the back of them a specific colour to identify the type, and varnishing a printout of the text on the front.

I am not above manual labour, but at the ripe old age of nearly forty, I am keenly aware of how long it takes. I’m also aware of the other constraints on my time, such as managing other folks in the office, writing full-length roleplaying games, writing one-page roleplaying games, nodding politely in meetings and knocking off early at four so I can smoke a spliff in the garden. 

Constructing the Eat the Reich kits with Will - which involved hand-making twenty five soul jars, hagstone necklaces, emergency suicide stakes etc (you can see the full contents of one of the boxes here) - took about a year of ad-hoc meetings spent experimenting and iterating. After that, and despite how enjoyable it was to hang out with a like-minded artist and listen to Run the Jewels every couple of weeks, I decided that I would never again Make Fucking Loads of Something By Hand as a business endeavour.

I think at the time neither party realised that there would be over three hundred individual tokens, and perhaps we would have come up with a different solution, but I’m very glad they stuck it out. 

We had the tiles. I had my flights, and a hotel room in an Ibis Budget on the wrong side of the tracks. Time to spread the wisdom.

AN EXTENDED TANGENT ABOUT CHIPS

I had never visited Belgium before. I don’t travel well; a youth spent in the Algarvian countryside raised by two hermit parents has resulted in a brain chemistry where I very much need to have my things around me and be witnessed by as few people as possible. Travel sets me on edge. Where are my pills? Will I be able to get decent coffee? Will my bed be comfortable, my room quiet? How is it that one takes the bus in this particular country? How do I pronounce this beer’s name in such a way that the locals, even if they don’t necessarily understand me right away, don’t look at me like I’ve asked to take a shit in their outstretched palm when I order one? And so on, and so on.

But I am pleased to report that Belgium seems to be about as close as you can get to England without being physically attached to it, both culturally and geographically, and Leuven - where Kamping Kitbash took place this time - is pretty and generally walkable and the people don’t look at you too funny when you turn up wearing unusual clothes. Every third window has a pro-Palestine poster in it; every other lamp-post is graced with Trans Rights stickers. It seems like these folks are on the right side, or at least on a righter than we are at the moment with this Summer’s brief and exhausting flag obsession.

I arrived in Leuven on Thursday afternoon, strung out and ravenous having eaten only two slices of toast and as much espresso as I could stomach that morning. I quickly realised that it is almost impossible not to buy chips in Belgium; the main type of shop there is seemingly a Frituur - a maker of french fries and purveyor of what the Belgians call “snacks.”

“Snacks” is a loose catch-all term applied to anything you eat with chips, and it warms my fat-encrusted British heart to see so many varieties of deep-fried beige on offer. Most of them are a kind of battered or breaded sausage served in a paper tray - meat sausages! Cheese sausages! Vegetarian sausages! - but there’s also ball-shaped food, and the occasional disc-shaped food served in a bun. One skewer on show in the glass-fronted display fridge in the place I ate lunch had some raw onion on it next to bits of chicken, and honestly having fresh, non-beige ingredients visible felt unorthodox and a little brazen.

Belgian french fries are fucking great - even the bad ones - and there’s a reverence for the art over there that our equivalents to the Frituur (Chipsmiths?) don’t display. Chips are fried per order and tossed with salt in a big aluminum bowl, served entirely too hot and with any one of a dozen sauces, most of which are mayonnaise with something in it, but I’m not complaining. It’s a damn sight better than the wet paper satchels of potato we get, made even wetter with vinegar, and adorned with a thin smear of ketchup from a one-shot plastic syrette.

The snacks I could take or leave - but considering our equivalent is the humble battered sausage, an objectively disgusting object which contains as much pork as a bag of fucking Frazzles, there’s not a lot to compete with. (Or, in Scotland: the deep-fried Mars Bar. The deep-fried personal pan pizza. The deep-fried Creme Egg. The deep-fried stunt food that would not be out of place in some bumblefuck country fair in one of the less popular US states.) I had four chicken wings on a skewer. They were pretty good.

Later, at the Kitbash event, a young woman would recommend a “Bikky Burger” to me as the quintessential drunk Belgian food. As unadventurous as I am, I enjoy putting strange things in my mouth to see what they taste like, so after a very healthy dinner of vegetable pasta served to me by a gracious volunteer I ordered a Bikky Burger and fries on the walk back to my hotel from the bus in an attempt to shoulder-barge some calories into my system. 

Here is my review of the Bikky Burger: I was not drunk enough to enjoy the Bikky Burger. 

There was something of the battered sausage about it. It was a deep-fried pustule of a thing, the wet innards kept in check by a thin buffer of protein around the outside, and were it not for the aggressive use of mustard, relish and pickles on the bun it would have tasted like chewing on hot kitchen roll.  I found out that Bikky Burgers contained horse meat, something which I have never knowingly eaten, and I was excited to give it a go; I would like to now formally apologise to the horse whose hooves and scrotum were severed and ground into paste to pad out my dinner. 

DAY ONE: MAKING SOME TOY SOLDIERS

I arrived, unfashionably on time, to day one of the Kamping Kitbash. 

(Technically I arrived half an hour early, after walking in because of the aforementioned lack of bus confidence, and I spent that half hour drinking coffee in a nearby suburban cafe that was clearly someone’s living room barely converted into a food service business. It was a fine coffee. I want you to know that, behind the scenes, even if I give off a carefree and devil-may-care attitude, I am care-full. I give so many fucks that I often run out. The further I am from home, the more time I have spent precisely calculating when I should arrive so I a) don’t get in the way and b) don’t miss anything crucial.)

This year’s Kamp took place in a whacking great yellow mansion converted into a sort of hostel. Here’s a picture:

Most of the people at the event would be sleeping on site; I wouldn’t. Ever since moving to the leafy outskirts of Sheffield, I have begun snoring like a motherfucker without exception for several hours every night - perhaps the psychic strain of London released its grip on the flappy bits at the back of my throat - and I didn’t want to put anyone else through that, especially if I’d have to spend a weekend with them.

(I was explaining the situation to an Italian tattoo artist over lunch on Sunday, and he said “Oh, yeah! I know a few people who snore every night.” He cast a narrowed eye over at the adjacent table. “I met them fairly recently, actually.”)

So, right off the bat, there was a little separation there; couple that with the fact that I was being paid to turn up (although, you know, not enough to cover the flights) and that a surprising number of people seemed to know who I was and what I’ve done, and I immediately felt slightly off to one side.

Some of the other micro-celebrities there leant into it; Ana Polanšćak, known online as Gardens of Hecate, spent the weekend chain-smoking in a black leather jacket, talking only to people who had as many tattoos as she did. 

(Halfway through a cigarette, after introducing myself to her, she said:

“I’m Ana.”
“Oh! Are you the Ana?” I responded.
“Probably,” she said into the middle distance, and took another drag. Ana Polanšćak is so fuckin cool that you start to forget she makes toy soldiers for a living.)

Others, like Louise Sugden - ex-GW staffer, now solo videographer and little guy sculptor par excellence - scurried through the crowd goblinish displaying untrammelled enthusiasm for everything she saw. I tried to strike a balance between the two.

The first thing we did, after the wizard-themed introduction ceremony which involved a sort of call-and-response poetry recital that reminded us all of how to be a decent person and put the lids back on our paints, was a pass-along Kitbash. 

We each had about three minutes to mash some miniature parts together, and then pass them along to the left, whereupon the process would continue until an hour had elapsed and we had some real monstrosities to play with. It was a nice ice-breaker in as much as it got us talking to each other - that’s how I learned about Bikky Burgers - and also it lowered the bar with regards to how patient and precise we had to be with our toy soldiers. The important thing was to make something, not make the right thing, and whatever we could bodge onto the freak that was pressed into our palm within the time limit was acceptable. I used a hot glue gun on 28mm miniatures. I had to. 

The rest of the weekend ran as follows: at any given time, a workshop lead either by a micro-celebrity or a can-do volunteer was running in one room, and the other was devoted to free making. Participants were given unrestricted access to the massive stock of bits - hundred of sprues, thousands of loose parts poured into a paddling pool - and encouraged to do whatever the fuck they wanted.

Whatever the fuck I wanted was to make weirdo toy soldiers. I found some Dead Man’s Hand sprues - a range of pretty solid cowboys and cowgirls played straight - and some Stargrave sprues - North Star Miniatures’ modular sci-fi companion to their roleplaying-focused Frostgrave line - and figured it would be fun to make some sci-fi cowboys. I struggle with some of the wilder stuff that people turn out at the event; my style is a bit more restrained. Luckily I also found a load of plastic dinosaur toys in the aforementioned paddling pool, so the way forward was clear: futuristic cowboys riding dinosaurs. 

I finished the group of five on the first day, working as quickly as I could, because last year I only made the one miniature and I felt like I’d misspent my time. Dinner was, as I mentioned above, the very healthy peas and pasta affair with a vegan cheese sauce; the style, it seems, is to veer as close to benevolence as possible with the food to accommodate most diets. All very decent, and the planet thanks you, but it doesn’t half leave a fellow hankering for something dead in his mouth; the sort of pattern that leads to a ten pm horse puck eaten crouched over a fold-out table in one of Ibis Budget’s darker rooms. 

Coming next week: how the actual workshop worked out, musings on the sanctity of art, and the sure-fire gastric technique referred to as The Broom.